RS

MEMBER DIARY

Tax by the mile on Drudge

I just read a story on drudge that has me a little concerned. It’s about changing from taxing gasoline for roads and that to taxing by how many miles you drive. They bring up about electric cars and alternative-fuel vehicles using the roads but not buying as much gas as regular cars. Now at first I was ok I can see that but then I started thinking about the people who have to drive long distances to work, truck drivers, cab drivers, school buses and how the prices of everything would go up because the businesses would want to defray the extra costs to their businesses. Maybe not such a good idea.

The thing that really started to worry me was how they want to track that mileage. When I started reading I figured the easiest way to figure this would be monthly or yearly. At the beginning of each month your odometer is read and you pay taxes that way, right? Wrong! They want to equipe each car and truck with GPS, clocks and other equipement so they can record how many miles you drive, whether you were on highways or secondary roads, and whether you drove on-peak or off-peak hours. You would then be taxed when this information was downloaded.

Now maybe it’s just me but this scares me that the government would then be able to track everywhere I was at any time of day. Yes I know the report says that you would have to go somewhere to download the information but how long will it take for them to change to …”You know what that is so much of an inconvience to the people let’s just download the information remotely.” If on-star can start your car for you this could easily be done.